Science, artistry, and playfulness combine in
these elegant and vibrant origami sculptures
created by son-and-father duo Erik and Martin
Demaine. Each sculpture is a modular combination
of several interacting pieces. A compass is
used to score the creases and cut out a central
hole from a circle of paper, then each piece
is folded by hand. The paper folds itself into
a natural equilibrium form depending on its
creases. These equilibria are poorly understood,
especially for curved creases. The Demaines
are exploring what shapes are possible in this
genre of self-folding origami, with applications
to deployable structures, manufacturing, and
self-assembly.

Erik Demaine, a MacArthur Fellow and Alfred
P. Sloan Research Fellow, is a professor in the
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer
Science and a member of the Theory of
Computation Group in the Computer Science and
Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). An accomplished
artist, his interests include origami
and glassblowing.

Martin Demaine is the Angelika and Barton
Weller Artist-in-Residence in the Department of
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, a
technical instructor in the Department of Materials
Science and Engineering Glass Lab, and a
member of the Theory of Computation Group at
CSAIL.

The Demaines were named 2013 Guggenheim
Fellows for their work with origami from
wood, plastic, metal and glass. Several of their
joint curved origami sculptures are housed in
the permanent collections of the Museum of
Modern Art in New York and the Smithsonian
American Art Musuem.

Information on the arts at MIT, including academic
and extracurricular offerings, is available
at http://arts.mit.edu/.